The Native Tribes of South-East Australia

A. W. Howitt was a colonial-era ethnographer, and this Macmillan book is his foundational ethnographic survey of Aboriginal peoples of southeastern Australia, based on his own extended fieldwork and correspondence with local observers in the late nineteenth century. Its value as an early primary ethnographic record is real, it documents social organization, ceremony and belief among groups and practices that had already been substantially disrupted by colonization, in some cases the only detailed record that survives from this period. Its limit is equally real, Howitt was a colonial official writing within the assumptions and limitations of his era's anthropology, so a claim resting on his interpretation of what he observed should be checked against more recent scholarship, including Aboriginal communities' own accounts, rather than accepted as neutral description.